Caring About Case Management

The Meddbase team are releasing a set of changes in the latest system update on October 12th 2020. This includes some big improvements to the way we deal with case management  – along with other referrals from managers in the Referral Portal into Meddbase.

The key change for Meddbase users is that every Referral from now on will belong to a case, and that case’s name will be made visible to everyone that needs to interact with it  – from managers and administrators to clinicians.

Of course we have published technical documentation for customers which covers in detail how the new feature will work and how it can be configured and used in Meddbase, but here I’d like to talk about why we’re going down this route, and where we think these improvements to case management will take us all in the future.

Why I Care About Case Management

For a long time, we’ve known that our case management workflow, while powerful, was slightly divorced from the working reality of clinical and administrative staff in a couple of ways. Most importantly, although we technically assigned each appointment conducted to a case, there wasn’t really any way for the referring manager to view that, and it didn’t really impact the workflow at all. 

This meant that follow up referrals were almost completely unconnected from the referral that they were following up, and it was more difficult than it should have been for a manager, or even a Meddbase user, to see the entire lifetime of a case.

Back when I was a Meddbase customer I must confess this irked me, so now I’m on the other side of the fence and am a product architect I’m very happy to have the opportunity to help change this feature based on my own previous real world experience as a user.

How Occupational Health Can be Helped

The fundamental challenge I see with Occupational Health in general, and particularly with Occupational Health software, is making it easy for managers and employees to engage with the service, and these changes to Meddbase are just one part of the overall plan we have to facilitate that engagement.

While it’s all well and good to explain the myriad benefits of Occupational Health, if the processes and software used aren’t easily grokkable  – that is if they’re not intuitive for the user without extra explanation – then people just won’t use them and those benefits simply evaporate.

To that end, we wanted to make sure that the processes we asked people to follow when using the software matched the real-world processes as closely as possible. 

What we hope this will mean for our customers is higher levels of engagement from their clients’ staff, with less effort required to drive that engagement. And we want to build on that mantra going forward:

“software should be supporting the processes and people involved in Healthcare, not putting barriers in their path or dictating artificially complex workflows for no benefit.”

This also marks the start of a renewed commitment to Occupational Health as a sector on our part here at Meddbase – and with Meddbase being such a process-driven application, Occupational Health has always been a good fit for our product.

Looking forward I can see a lot of areas where we can do even more to help improve the health and wellbeing of the workforce as well as providing time and effort-saving solutions to administration and clinical teams.